Cooperative Catalyst Audio Podcast

Joe just invited me to join the Cooperative Catalyst so I’m posting here for the first time. This is a great idea!

He and I have just started an audio podcast for the Cooperative Catalyst, with the idea of increasing the type of media we use to engage other educators. Our objective is to try to find ways to break out of the expanding, but still relatively narrow, circle of educators to whom our conversation about educational reform extends.

We have some ideas we’ve started with and we are looking for some feedback, and some contributors to this podcast.

First, both of us agree that the podcasts should not be too long; somewhere in the range of 20 to 25 minutes. This will allow enough time for reflection, but not be too onerous for the listeners of the podcast to finish. If I download a podcast and I see that it is an hour long, I may not even bother listening to it. Too short and it’s too difficult to convey any complex ideas effectively.

Next, we want the podcasts to be a relatively open format. We’d be happy with many contributors to the podcast as long as each podcast has reasonable audio quality and the discussion that happens is focused on education in some way. Our plan is to have discussions via Skype and record the conversations, but however people want to generate the audio seems fine with me. I’d personally like the recordings to be mostly conversations rather than soliloquies just because this is more interesting.

If you want to participate in this side-project of the Cooperative Catalyst, post a comment to that effect and we can talk about how you can join.

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About David Wees

David Wees is a Canadian teacher with 7 years international experience. He started his career in inner city NYC in a failing school. He met his wife in the spring of 2005 and together they moved to London, England where David taught in a small private school which was David’s first exposure to the International Baccalaureate curriculum. London was too expensive, even compared to NYC, so after 2 more years they moved on to Bangkok, Thailand where David taught for 2 years. David has co-authored a textbook for IB Mathematics, and has his Masters degree in Educational Technology. He is now in Vancouver, Canada, working as a learning specialist in technology. He blogs regularly at http://davidwees.com.

We were looking at using something from http://www.opensourcemusic.com but if you are composer we’d much rather have an original piece of work. I have a friend who is interested in participating who plays a mean guitar, maybe you two can chat. My musical talents lie in singing, which I’m not sure would be appropriate for an opening…

What do people think about using a Voicethread to combine our efforts for this first podcast? We could each leave a brief comment, export the Voicethread (which has a small fee associated with it) and then I can isolate the audio from the Voicethread to use for our podcast. Voice quality here will depend entirely on the microphones we each use to submit our comments.

I think that I like Kirsten’s topic best as it is a strong opening topic, and easily lends itself to smaller subtopics we can explore in more detail later. I also like David’s topic but I think it could be a whole episode by itself and doesn’t lend itself to branching off quite as easily for later. It could be a stand-alone episode in a later issue of the podcast.